Crafty chess program

I've started playing chess again. I found a delightful chess program on the innerwebs called "Crafty." It's written by Robert Hyatt, the same guy who did Cray Blitz, so the mojo is flowing.

Crafty has a mode in which it annotates games and generates an HTML file of the game, variations, and diagrams. Unfortunately, the graphics for the diagrams don't seem to be available. The board looks terrible without them ;-)

So here's a link to a page that offers public domain piece art that works well with Crafty.

Finishing the headstock

Not much more to report, repairs on the lathe are coming down to a large number of very small tasks. I decided to replace both belts with Fenner link belts. A Fenner link belt is a v-belt made of some very tough stuff. The trick is that instead of the belt being a continuous loop, Fenner uses interlocking pieces:



While the piece is 2" long or so, the adjacent pieces overlap so that adding a 2" link adds about an inch of length to the belt.

And since the belt was on I added a belt cover from an Atlas lathe. Same manufacturer, probably a different model. Fortunately it fit ok. You don't want the spinning cogs under the cover exposed.



Here's what it looks like with the cover open:



The motor needs to go on soon. It looks like I'll be mounting a 1/2 HP 3-phase. This requires some electrical work so the starting the lathe is a few weeks out yet.

Remaining biggies for the lathe include making a shim for the leadscrew mounting bracket and repairing the carriage's lateral movement gears.